38 pages • 1-hour read
Cyclops
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Background
Literary Context: The Myth of Odysseus and the Cyclops
Euripides’s Cyclops is a reworking of a popular myth best known from Book 9 of Homer’s Odyssey, one of the earliest works of Greek literature. In the Odyssey, the hero Odysseus lands on the island of the Cyclops while sailing home from fighting in the Trojan War. Odysseus and a few men from his crew are captured by the savage Cyclops Polyphemus, a son of the sea god Poseidon, who traps them in his cave by rolling a gigantic boulder over the only entrance. Scorning Greek conventions of hospitality, Polyphemus kills Odysseus’s men two at a time and eats them raw. The clever Odysseus eventually devises a plan to escape, however. After introducing himself as Nemo (Greek for “nobody”), he presents Polyphemus with some of the wine he and his men have brought with them until Polyphemus is drunk. Then, while Polyphemus is asleep, Odysseus and his men drive a huge sharpened stake into his one eye, blinding him. Polyphemus calls on the other Cyclopes for help, but when they ask him what is wrong he is only able to respond that “Nobody” has blinded him, and the Cyclopes conclude that Polyphemus has merely had a bad dream. The next morning, Polyphemus rolls the boulder from the entrance to the cave to pasture his sheep, but stands over the entrance to catch Odysseus and his men as they try to escape. Once again, however, Odysseus outsmarts him, tying himself and his men to the bellies of Polyphemus’s sheep so that the Cyclops fails to detect them as he runs his hands over the backs of his sheep.
The story of Odysseus and the Cyclops follows a familiar fairy-tale pattern, with a hero facing a monstrous foe that he manages to outsmart. Euripides’s Cyclops adapts the story for a genre very different from his epic source. For example, the boulder Polyphemus uses to close his cave disappears: Odysseus and his men are kept in the cave by the needs of the comic plot. Similarly, they are captured in the first place through the comical but rather bizarre intervention of Silenus, the leader of the satyrs. Nor do Odysseus and his crew escape by tying themselves to the bellies of sheep, as they do in the Odyssey (this particular trick would surely have been very different to stage in the fifth century BCE). But the most obvious difference, of course, is the inclusion of the absurd satyrs in Euripides’s version. The satyrs are by turns helpful, helpless, and actively inimical to Odysseus, providing a comical foil to the serious epic hero Odysseus.
Genre Context: The Satyr Play
Euripides’s Cyclops is the only complete example of a satyr play that has survived from antiquity. In Athens, each playwright wrote a satyr play to be performed after a set of three tragedies at the festival in the city of Dionysia. Satyr plays were thus a part of the dramatic unit known as the “tetralogy,” that is, three tragedies followed by a satyr play. The satyr plays were typically burlesques of mythical stories, featuring a Chorus made up of satyrs—half-man and half-horse (or half-goat) devotees of the god Dionysus. The Chorus would be clad in distinctive satyr masks and wore special suits that featured erect phalluses and horse tails. Though structurally similar to tragedies, satyr plays tended to be far more ribald and sexually graphic. They were also marked by reduced musical formality. The language used by characters of satyr plays was less elevated than that of tragedy, though not quite so low as that of comedy.
Satyr plays were an important part of Athenian tragic competitions through the Classical Period (490-323 BCE). Though the only satyr play that has survived intact is Euripides’s Cyclops, many fragments from other satyr plays are known, and about half of Sophocles’s Trackers has been preserved on a papyrus. There were also many depictions of satyr play performances in the visual arts of ancient Athens, especially on vase paintings. A comparison of these different sources, however sparse, suggests that certain motifs were particularly prominent in satyr plays. These include the patterns of captivity and liberation, an emphasis on extraordinary inventions, athletic events, wine, and nature.
Academic Context: Euripides’s Cyclops in Scholarship
Cyclops does not seem to have been one of Euripides’s more popular plays. It survives as one of the “alphabetic plays” of Euripides, preserved in a manuscript that groups Euripides’s plays alphabetically rather than by popularity. Today, the play is mostly studied in connection with the genre of satyr drama, of which it is the only intact surviving example.
Scholars compare Euripides’s Cyclops with extant fragments of other satyr plays to unpack how this play is representative of the genre while also being unique. Dana Sutton (The Greek Satyr Play, 1980), for instance, points out that some themes, such as nature and even athletics, were popular in many satyr plays by Euripides and his contemporaries. Other scholars have fit Euripides’s play into its broader social and cultural context, for example by exploring the values of Athenian identity in the late fifth century BCE. Several important essays on the social and cultural context of Euripides’s Cyclops and satyr drama in general are compiled in a volume edited by G. W. M. Harrison (Satyr Drama: Tragedy at Play, 2005). This recent research, spearheaded perhaps most prominently by P. E. Easterling, has especially shown that satyr plays closely engaged with tragedies, reflecting on and repurposing tragic themes.
Euripides’s Cyclops has also been discussed as a specific instance of a literary work rather than as representative of the larger and largely lost genre of satyr drama. Scholarly commentaries explore various aspects of the play’s literary qualities (stylistic, linguistic, or generic) alongside its social, cultural, and historical context. Perhaps the most important modern commentary on the play is by Richard Seaford (Euripides: Cyclops, 1984), which advanced the argument (now accepted by many scholars) that the play was first produced in 408 BCE. Also important is the commentary of Patrick O’Sullivan and Christopher Collard (Euripides’ Cyclops and Major Fragments of Greek Satyric Drama, 2013), which traces Euripides’s indebtedness to earlier sources, such as Homer, while also exploring his play within the context of other, more fragmentary satyr plays from the same period, such as Sophocles’s Trackers.
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